DSL vs cable internet?

[plutonic]

It is true what your Verizon guy say, that is that you would be sharing the connection on cable and if you have any bandwidth hogs on your cable line, you could get slower speeds. For the most part you will get the advertised speed as, even if people are torrenting, how much can they torrent.

A good place to check out your current speed is http://www.speedtest.net

The reason that DSL will give you the speed advertised is that each individual subscriber is wired right to the phone company office and all of the connections are aggregated by a router known as a DSLAM onto a fiber line that goes to the company's operation center or other place where they exchange internet traffic such as a couple of internet "hotels" in New York or other large city.